UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Recasting the Machine Age
Henry Ford’s Village Industries

Howard P. Segal

How Henry Ford created a new model
of small-scale industrial production

Recasting the Machine Age recounts the history of Henry Ford's efforts to shift the production of Ford cars and trucks from the large-scale factories he had pioneered in the Detroit area to nineteen decentralized, small-scale plants within sixty miles of Ford headquarters in Dearborn. The visionary who had become famous in the early twentieth century for his huge and technologically advanced Highland Park and River Rouge complexes gradually changed his focus beginning in the late 1910s and continuing until his death in 1947.

According to Howard P. Segal, Ford decided to create a series of "village industries," each of which would manufacture one or two parts for the company's vehicles. Although he imagined that the rural setting of these decentralized plants would allow workers to become part-time farmers, Ford's plan did not represent a reaction against modern technology. The idea was to continue to employ the latest technology, but on a much smaller scale—and for the most part it worked. All nineteen of these village industries helped save their communities from decline, in several cases ensuring their survival through the Great Depression. The majority of workers in the village industries, moreover, appear to have preferred their working and living conditions to those in Detroit and Dearborn.

Ford may well have been motivated to spend great sums on the village industries in part to prevent the unionization of his company. But these industrial experiments represented much more than "union busting." They were significant examples of profound social, cultural, and ideological shifts in America between the World Wars as reflected in the thought and practice of one notable industrialist. Segal recounts the development of the plants, their fate after Ford's death, their recent revival as part of Michigan's renewed appreciation of its industrial heritage, and their connections to contemporary efforts to decentralize high-tech working and living arrangements.

"Like Philip Scranton's Endless Novelty Segal's work adds an important layer of analysis to historical research on the alternative shape and contour of U.S. manufacturing. It opens up fertile ground for further research around issues of technology, labor -management relations and local economic development. . . .This important and thought-provoking book encourages us to reflect on the possibilities for creating such a world by reassessing our presuppositions about mass production and the paths of modernity."
Technology and Culture
"A fascinating subject, one well deserving of a modern scholar's attention. .
. . The book makes a significant impact on our understanding of Henry Ford's auto industry, America's machine age, and patterns of industrial decentralization."

Amy Sue Bix, author of Inventing Ourselves out of Jobs?:
America's Debate over Technological Unemployment
"Howard Segal's treatment of his subject is the best I have read, going far beyond anyone else's work and being as definitive as we likely shall see. Recasting the Machine Age is fair, objective, scholarly, and up-to-date."

David L. Lewis, author of The Public Image of Henry Ford:
An American Folk Hero and His Company

"Recasting the Machine Age makes two important contributions to the literature: first, a solid history of Ford's fascinating village industries and, second, a sophisticated analysis of the history of decentralization in American industry. Remarkably enough, both of these interrelated—but non-Fordist—issues can be traced directly to Henry Ford."

History: Reviews of New Books

HOWARD P. SEGAL is professor of history at the University of Maine and author of Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America (University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).

American History / History of Technology
280 pp., 25 illus.
$34.95s cloth, ISBN 978-1-55849-481-7
August 2005

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